Category: Perspectives

This week’s letters to the editor bring up responses to senate coverage and elections, civil disobedience-related arrests, and to criticism of the weekly column “Count me OUT”

This week Elise critiques the underwhelming interest in Student Senate elections.

This week’s Staffer Talks brings up the issue of communication between disagreeing Americans

Read this week’s letters to the editor to see students and faculty to respond to hot issues *other* than the war

Last month, I bought a small stool from East Africa. It’s old, though no one knows how old. It’s very heavy. It is about two feet tall. It has no joints, being hewn from one piece of wood. The seat is round and deeply concave, like a bowl for kneading bread. The surface is dark and burnished from use. It has three thick legs that curve out horizontally just before they touch the floor.

How far will people go to get their point across? Dozens of naked women spelled out “No War” with their bodies last week in protest of violence in the Middle East. How far is too far? Perhaps clich?, but it is a valid question in this age of bringing decency to its limits and juxtaposed to intense political correctness.

This week’s letters to the editor brings up questions of accountability in student media budget shortfalls

Silence equals death in the GLBT community. There has been a recent rise in intersexuality visibility. Intersexism, can definitely be a subdivision in the GLBT community, yet not all of communities have added the acronym because of knowledgeable support and social constructs. Personally, I did not know a great deal about members of the intersexed community and I felt it was important to learn something about which is definitely an accepted subdivision of the queer community. I went on a journey to figure out what exactly intersexuality is and was.

Sometimes I hear it in my dreams, the ding-ding of the trolley on it’s way to lands untold. And as I rejoin the waking world I fondly remember King Friday XIII with his stately white beard and the shy Striped Tiger named Daniel and of course the owl X and the Lady Fairchilde. As a twenty-four year old I’ve grown beyond them (I tell myself firmly) but nonetheless I miss them, and yes I think some small part of me still loves them, but that part still wears superman underroos to bed in my mind.

“It is not a rank on my brother to say he has certain mental disorders known as emotional problems and he is often called a fag and has had to run for his life on many occasions. He is a gentle person and this is a juvenile delinquency world. He is a Sagittarius and sometimes a freakster.”

Elise Adams and her crew at The FREE PRESS are used to dealing with adversity. This is journalism boot camp, and the students who can stand it get the best education possible while providing a great service to the USM community.

When I was 23 years old I started commuting by bicycle. Getting me from school in the mornings to four different part-time jobs in the afternoons was more than Boston’s public transportation system could effectively handle. Unfortunately, I had not grown up riding a bike, and I wasn’t in particularly good shape. My childhood was spent curled up on the couch with a book.

This week’s letters to the editor comment on the athlete of the week feature and feature more response to the war debate.

So, you think you might be queer, but aren’t sure? I personally believe that there are many levels of queerness. The Kinsey Scale is one way people have measured “gayness” in the past, and although the research is a little outdated–it’s from the 1940s–I think the analogy still works. It measures homosexuality on a sliding scale of one through six and recognizes there are many sexual orientations.

This weeks letter from the editor

This week’s letters to the editor run the gamut of war and peace in fiery response to a letter last week in support of war.

Okay, so my editors, Nicolette and Elise, tell me that it is my turn to write the weekly column in which a “staffer” speaks. For those of you who aren’t down with THE FREE PRESS jive, a staffer is someone who works here. Right. You knew that, it’s not hard to figure out.

Bisexuality is the outcast sibling of the queer community. Often viewed with suspicion by gay men and lesbians, bisexual people are at the same time not completely members of the straight community either. My best friend Kyle and I took a break from our incessant, coffee-fueled chewings of tangential life issues to continue an ongoing conversation on paper, for the benefit of you all.

At birth we are wrapped in pink or blue blankets, depending on our assigned sex. From then on we are socialized as boys or as girls. We are taught how to look like them, to act like them, to think like them, to feel like them, to be them.

Three days after my sixth birthday, the space shuttle Challenger exploded a minute after launch, killing all seven aboard including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Millions watched the launch on television that day. A shuttle launch was a big deal back then. We knew all the astronauts; they were heroes. Most of my friends and I wanted to be Sally Ride when we grew up.

This week’s letters to the editor respond to crime, Somalis, and anti-war sentiment

I was 12 years old and on a flight bound for Pittsburgh when I had an epiphany. It dawned on me-while sitting in coach with Nirvana’s newly released “In Utero” blaring through my headphones-that I was destined to be a rock star.

As just about any visitor from Europe or Latin America or Asia these days will tell you, the adage that truth is the first victim of war is demonstrated every hour of every day in this country as Washington chafes at the bit to get on with it while a compliant media act like cheerleaders, and much of the public jumps to salute.

Letters from the Editor: When I was in fourth grade our small group of “gifted and talented” outcasts were trained on methods of stress management. “This will be important,” Mrs. Siegal promised. “You will be doing a lot of things and stress is likely to affect you.”